Table of Contents:
Profile | Background | Process | CHANGES | Insights
NAME: Matt van Leeuwen
COMPANY: McCANN
TITLE: HEAD OF DESIGN
FROM:HOLLAND
CURRENTLY LOCATED:BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
SPECIALTY OR AREA OF INTEREST:GRAPHIC DESIGN
Adam: What have you been working on?
Matt: Oh, my God, yeah, it feels like a lifetime. I've been at McCann Design now for a year and a half. Before that, I was at Mother for 5 years. These days, I’m back in the city and I get to cycle around. It's good to be around humans, as much as they tire me out. At least sometimes. But, I love being back in the city. .
Now that I live in Philly, it makes me realize how ambitious New York is compared to the rest of America.
It's okay to be busy here. It’s wonderful. I feel like it's the thing I'm good at, and you can just be very much yourself, just be a hard worker, and be okay with that and… live a hellish life in a relatively small apartment. And that's okay and a kind of a wonderful thing.
Like other world class cities, New York offers you that opportunity to be around people that just don't exist anywhere else.
Yes, I think so. I always joke. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the States but here, but anyway.
Philly sometimes looks pretty.
It is, but it has a lot of problems. It's a poor city, and you know it has a shockingly high crime rate.
There's there's plus points, and you know, negative points to to all of that
The first question I want to ask is about process. What does your creative process look like, from the moment you hear about a project through to completion?
If you asked me that question 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, I would have given you a different answer, because I would have been in a different position.
In branding we had a very clearly defined role who we were as designers. So it's mainly identity. When an ask came in, it was usually around identity. Over the years it shifted to sometimes include experience design, but brand identity was at the core of what we did.
And now, I'm enjoying the fact that I don't do that many logos anymore. That's just one kind of project, and now we’re kind of world building [through design]. I think Brian Collins said that at one point. We're just just creating worlds. The asks can be big or they can be really small. It could be a logo, but it could also be a campaign or motion. The diversity of the asks is what I’m excited out these days.
That’s really interesting, when we were at Interbrand and we were working on brand design it was almost like the ivory tower of academia. “We only make logos or guidelines.”
Now it's such a… I've grown to appreciate creativity in its most diverse state. I suppose it's sort of like we're looking at packaging or experience design. I was looking at a project list we were making, and Identity is only a small part of everything we’re working on.
We're currently developing a typeface for our brand. And yes, we're looking at logos, but we're also looking at packaging. We're looking at pop up stores. We're looking at small things. Tiny little animations. Sometimes it's an infographic. It's a little bit of everything.
When projects come in we question “is it worth our time?” That’s aside from “is this going to make money.” It’s more like, “is it worth our time, do we even have the time to do this right now?” Partly because we’re always so busy.
I'd like to hear more about the factors that go into the consideration about it being worthwhile. From where I sit, the factors that come to mind are money and resources. “Is this advancing a strategic aim? Do I want to do more work with this client or this type of client?” But, what I want to hear about from you is what would be an interesting project? What gets you excited?
Visually interesting? With a brand? Or a project? It has to be visually interesting or creatively challenging. Is it doing something we haven't done before? Or is it a project for a brand we admire?
Sometimes it's like, “Do we want to spend our time doing this while we could be doing something else?” That's not always an easy one.
When you’re sitting and thinking about that problem, is it a step by step problem solving process to come to that answer? Or is it more intuitive?
So, we're doing design at McCann. Historically… but I don't know if we still want to talk about ads, or if it's more about creativity. Some people say, “I don't want to see ads anymore. Who reads them, anyway?” Some clients are big, some clients are small, but it's a big pool with all kinds of things that are constantly hitting you or asking for help. From the smallest things to do giant things.
So, I always think about it as a creative challenge. Or I think, “oh, this is kind of a challenge! This is a fun sort of thing! It's a good question, Adam.
Not at all, I’m just giving you room to think about that. Let’s change course slightly. I'm hearing you talk about challenges in a positive way. Now, I want to turn that around and ask what are some negative challenges in the course of your work? Or, what do you find are the biggest obstacles to feeling you’re doing your best possible work
I think you talked about it a little bit. You talked a little bit about it before, right? It's we're not the only we're not the only group in the house, right? There's a strategy team, an account team, project managers going in between. And, I have a boss, the chief creative in New York, but she has a boss, too. The North American creative chief.
So I think the hardest part is sometimes, to align on all those things, to align on all these perspectives, to come to a creative solution. You might hear this, probably more from people on smaller teams, but I feel like the challenge is how quickly or easily you can get to the solution.
I have a multipart question in this creative process bucket. How has the role changed, how has the landscape changed, and how has what we do as an industry changed? How have the tools that you use change, or the tools that your team uses change?
Oh, my God, I have a little book. There's a funny Dutch book from… Oh, my God, I'm going to Google this. She wrote a book and I forgot the name. This thing is probably 10-15 years old at this point. The title is, “Everyone Is a Designer in the Age of Social Media.”
It’s sort of like, “Okay, you go to the design studio because of designers. They’ve got their tools. They have Illustrator and Photoshop, and they know what to do.” But, if you look at the industry today, everything has democratized over the years. It's the introduction of Figma and Canva. What else is out there? All these new platforms for creative making. It has democratized and opened up the landscape, so I don't want to say everybody's a designer these days, but I do feel like it has opened people up to design.
I definitely see a lot more account people being opinionated these days compared to maybe 10-50 years ago. But, it's also a sign of the times. I think we're spending so much time on social media right where we’re constantly scrolling through feeds of visuals and typography and color And it's an interesting observation. How it has sort of a speak. Design has become, or sort of shifted from an expertise to kind of a… I feel like everybody's kind of a designer these days. And I love that little book with provocation from me, because it's an oldie, but she was very right there. In that sense I think things have changed. Yes.
Do you embrace the change?
There's no remorse, or there's no sadness about it. No, it is what it is. I'm also curious about all the new technologies that are coming, right? AI, and all the conversations around those things. I have no idea how that's gonna impact creativity or the work but I can see it happening already. I can see how it's so easy to imagine certain images that you would have spent a lot of time Photoshopping.
10 years ago you wanted to put an elephant in Times Square. Well, you had a good afternoon of trying to Photoshop that and now it's just like just with AI It's done in no time. And I don't know how that's gonna impact things.
I haven’t seen that yet.
But, all these tools, AI, and Canva… I mean even Instagram! If you post a story now, it gives you all kinds of layout tools. And you can choose between different typefaces. So, people are just more aware.
It's funny, I'm still very passionate about design. I don't think it has affected me. I'm not a nostalgic person in the sense that I long for a simpler time. But, that’s where my mind goes. Not a direct set of stops, but I ended up at that order.
[My former boss at Landor, Wally Krantz] is a type guy. He loves type, you love type as well. But Wally has a very formal approach to type. He likes the mathematics and structure as well as the form of type. Working with him made me realize how little I knew, because I didn't have formal design training. Now I look at Canva or Instagram and I know that somebody who understands something about type is involved with all of these Canva layouts. Everything looks good. It looks reasonably good, but it doesn’t live up to high design each and every time. So someone with no design training can make something that looks reasonably good fairly easily, and at the same time I wonder if some of that knowledge gets lost.
Yes, a little bit of an extinction of knowledge, but I mean, I also love Tibor. Remember Tibor? Tibor Kalman, I mean. Tibor wasn't trained as a designer at all. He didn't have any of Wally's knowledge when he started designing. Yeah, he was meant to do other things in life. And then just sort of rolled into design.
I love Wally's perspective. Because, yeah, I have a lot of feelings around type as well. but I also appreciate these other perspectives, and I'm realizing that with the democratization of software, type design is like.. I mean, I think we live in an abundant world of type options these days, I mean, back in the days you had a few houses. Yeah, I don't know. It was Monotype and there were little type houses. There were people here and there, but it has grown tremendously over the last few years. And it's amazing.
Back in the day, maybe people took a long time to make something new. I just see so many new typefaces every day, every day new studios come up. Maybe that makes it a little bit transient, or everything goes a little faster. And I hear you, some of the knowledge might disappear, but at the same time I love the liveliness and the energy that's in the air.
I feel like we could spend the rest of our discussion going down this route, but I want to talk to you about working relationships and briefs. What is the most useful information in a brief? What are the most useful things for you and your design team to consider?
A good brief is… it sounds so silly, but a good brief, I suppose, is one where you're left with no questions. What does a good brief have? A clear ask. There's a little moment of, ”this what the competition is doing.”
It shouldn't be a rushed job. I think the more detail in a brief, the better. Right. If you're asking me about the formal qualities of a good brief, I think go in depth and don't feel the need to speak a certain way or feel like you're speaking to designers.
I always feel like the simpler put, the better. Sometimes we use acronyms in the industry to talk about certain things, or we talk in a specific sort of language, or a design language and I'd love to be treated a little bit like a dummy. Just like, tell me what you want, and in the simplest of ways. Like I would talk to somebody here in the grocery store or how I would talk to my neighbor, right? I think that that's usually a good brief. And a clear ask.
It sounds really silly. But that’s what you want…
At what point in the process, after you receive the brief do you like to have a broader team conversation? Whether that's with account, strategy or directly to the client. How do you like to take the brief? Think about it and go back to them or do you want them to be more collaborative from the get go?
Usually it comes in through account. So the first conversation I'll have is with account to understand what the ask or the brief is, and we say yes or no. Then we work on the brief or account works on the brief. Then we brief the team, and in this case ,it could be a designer and a copywriter, or it could be just designers. Or, it could be a strategist and a writer and a designer and an art director.
Then, depending on the amount of time, you want to give people time. Exploration time, time to let them wander a little bit, let them think about the creative challenge. Then, and only then, do you regroup again.
You want… creatives need time to get the thoughts together, maybe sketch a bit. And then, yeah, before we regroup with accounts. At that point, we want to present ideas back we're all liking. I wouldn't put people back in front of account too soon.
You know I sometimes joke, we have to please the design gods to make the best work. But I think account wants to please the clients, so they have a different agenda. And I just want to protect the creators from that agenda. But, I really try to please the creative to design gods first before that.
I'd given you a prompt before we had this call. I asked you to think of a couple of examples of projects that you enjoyed working on, or that you felt really good about. Tell me about a project where you felt that sense of collaboration we’ve been talking about.
At Interbrand? We're all there, we’d build a great identity and then we’d joke about how the advertising agency was screwing things up, right? So it's like, “Oh, we got such a pretty logo, but look at those ads!” So I went to Mother Design. At Mother, you know, design is a big part of their agency and we started doing pitches for things like… for instance, one of my joyful experiences there was pitching TripAdvisor.
At one point it wasn’t a brand. It was like one of those early successes in the whole dot com that had come with the Kayak's and Airbnb… all of that. I think the success of Trip Advisor waned a little bit. But we did these amazing pitches. That were around, big platform ideas. So that was high creative advertising thinking, like, okay, this is gonna be a tagline for the next few years.
And then simultaneously, a big part of ask also a design project the client didn't ask for. They just wanted advertising, but we were saying “You know what I think? That logo is probably 20 years old. By now, I think it can use a little uplift, and maybe we can simplify the color palette and introduce a cool type of graphic voice here.. And it was like, “you're kind of singing with the headlines and art direction and design vision. And we just sold in the whole identity along with some crazy ad idea. And then ads came out. We're just like, alright…That's just what a designer would dream of, and that was so, so, so so wonderful!
So I think I see a world where advertising and design can coexist. Our directors think of design like “Yeah, it's cool, but so difficult to work with.” And the designers think, “Oh, these advertising boys! They just don't know.” But, things can just sort of coexist, and it's such a beautiful thing! I mean, I'm fairly new at McCann and the whole design studio. We don't even have a website yet. But, it's a delight when these things can actually come together and coexist, and do well.
I want to go a bit deeper on that, because one of the things I've been thinking about is not so much whether it's good or bad work. I feel like when we were in brand agencies that was the evaluation. “Is this a good design, or is this a bad design? This is a good identity, this a bad identity.”
That felt very binary, very black and white.But, who's the decider of what's good and bad? I thought we were working with a number of very talented people, and I thought, “even though this is in the bad bucket, it still looks pretty good to me! What am I missing?”
Oh, it's tricky, and it's the hardest part of a job. We're not in the business of exact science. It's sort of like everything else. Everything is a fucking feeling. So I think that it represented a moment in time about good and bad. But you know, I feel like now there's a different paradigm. That's shifted for me. And I don't know, but I'm hearing other people saying this, but my sense is that we're now talking about the quality of something, and this feels like it has more of a spectrum to it.
So, now let’s talk about the quality of the creative work that we have. I think that's a bit different than good or bad. Being low quality doesn't necessarily mean bad. I think that that's more of what we're talking about when we say everyone’s a designer.
Having grown up in Europe, when I came to New York I bought a certain idea of aesthetics with me. And it's been blown to pieces over the years, but not entirely.
For me, it's more about simplicity or clarity. Does it clearly communicate something? Or is it pure? Like if you're going to go, go! Go Swiss… then go Swiss all the way! If you want to go punk, then go punk all the way right!
So it's maybe that's about quality, right? Like. there's really good punk. That has a quality. If it's really good kitsch, then that has a good quality, too. So maybe it's about going all the way.
We're not in the business of exact science. It's sort of like everything else. Everything is a fucking feeling.
Alright. Yeah.
It's interesting. But sometimes it makes it hard to like. Everything is fair game these days. I find it hard to like.
It’s like we have an idea of what the 70’s stood for or what the 80’s stood for, or even kind of have an idea of what the 90’s stood for. But I don't know where we are in the 2020’s. But, maybe if you stood in the middle of the 80s it was messy, too. Right? It's more of something you can do in hindsight.
Maybe that has to do with the democratization of everything and the openness of it. Everything is fair game. I know amazing designers who are great at script, I know amazing designers who are, I don't know the most modern sense of designers. And I love them all dearly. But, maybe it's the commitment of going all the way. Of doing it, really doing whatever you do really well and and do it with love. And when you missed your love, or you missed that going all the way then maybe that's the moment you say, “Oh. that's not so good.” Because you can, if you know what I mean?
Yes, absolutely. Do you feel like your role now is to empower your team to go all the way?
I hope so.
I don't know how you do it in your job, but on the top of my shoulder are all the experiences, all the experiences I’ve had. All my former bosses, former CD bosses, and the people I’ve always had around me. All the things that I’ve been critical of. And, I think, as you grow older and grow more until you're all of these are chances to do it better than any of them.
So, yeah, I hate those… I've never loved the type of CD that doesn't give you enough space or is too specific. So it's like, “Okay, I'm trying to be hands off. I'm trying to give people the space.” But sometimes I also have to jump in to steer, and it's a fine line. So, power empowering, inspiring. And at the same time, on a very practical level, just making sure projects are going and running.
Something you said, Matt, is that we all have a boss. So even the design warrior who’s fighting against ugliness… Even if their boss is just the person who's just paying for the project, they're being given an opportunity to go fight ugliness.
But there’s still a boss in a way, right? And that's the way I think about it as I get older. It’s not a boss in a negative sense. But as you say we have these experiences on our shoulders that inform our own careers in both positive and negative ways. So it's a bit like “Oh, this person I worked with did this, and it was horrible, and I hated that. Part of me is carrying that around like I can't forget it, but also at the same time, I'm going to make sure I never do that to somebody else. These are the lessons we learn and who we become.
Sometimes you do a project because you just want to work with that person. Or you don't do it because you don’t want to. It's not so black and white. Sometimes the reasons why you choose to do something or not. Yes, to all of these things. Yes.
So, I'm imagining this person who is creative in a non-traditional way coming and needing design work from McCann but they don't necessarily have an agency buying background. They have some great ideas. You know what they want. They have some interesting problem to solve. But they may not have a huge budget, so that's not going to be the thing that gets them in. That's not where account is going to bring you the brief. They're going to bring it for some other reason. What would be the thing for you that would make you say, “Oh, that's really interesting. This person and the problem are interesting to me.”
The challenge. It's just that the challenge is a broad definition. Like an Interbrand it was a very clearly defined thing. Okay, we can make a beautiful logo out of this. Yeah, we might take it at a loss. But then we get to do our thing. And now it's a lot broader. Also the amount of room of creativity you're giving us. Sometimes we work on very, very big brands. But they put us in a very tight kind of guideline world. “Well, you can do all these things, but here are the guidelines.” And I think, “yeah, if there's a little bit more freedom.” That's what we're all craving for as creatives. To build a new world, or to set the guidelines for something, or go outside the usual boundaries is what triggers us.
Thank you again for this conversation and I'm really happy to hear about your work and your team at McCann.
Thank you, Adam.
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